I don't apologize for making this thing so long.
I'm like a man of modest means who suddenly inherits vast wealth or wins the Lottery; it's hard to know what to do with it all.
That's what TIME is like for me now. I wake up each morning with more of it than I know what to do with. And it's surprising, and slightly disheartening, to realize that spending time often requires spending money. Even the train ride I have promised myself for several years, from Provo to Salt Lake and back again, will cost me $15.00. That's a lot of hamburger.
So I don't think I'll be indulging in travel or new hobbies. The cheapest way for me to spend my time is in reading and writing. And it's what I enjoy doing the most, outside of cooking and making people laugh.
So I've got to figure out ways and means to improve my reading experience, and enjoy my writing, so I never have to fear that my compositions are an imposition on those I share them with.
I've become much more finicky about what I read -- I toss aside most of the books I start reading while at the library. I've recently discovered the Disc World series by Terry Pratchett, which are a new joy to read. Plus I am revisiting old reliables like P.G. Wodehouse and Patrick O'Brien.
As for writing, I am taking a page from the life of Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in his autobiography that in order to learn how to write elegant English he studied the great English essayists of his time, such as Samuel Johnson and Joseph Addison, and consciously copied their style until he arrived at a style of his own.
I am studying how people like Calvin Trillin and Roger Angell write, and copying not neccessarily their style but how they go about putting a sentence and paragraph together and what they put into and leave out of a sentence or paragraph. I am finding that this study expends a huge amount of time, and it doesn't feel wasted to me.
So, again, I don't apologize for the length of this piece. Improving my writing style takes a lot of words.
But realizing that most people don't have the time or inclination to sit still long enough to read a thousand words or more, I will chop up this epistle into bite-size pieces, so you can pick and choose what you'd like to read and what you'd like to skip. Like a literary buffet.
Maybe that will make this a better reading experience for you, and force me to become a better writer as well.
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I'm still thinking about starting a Master Clown class in my apartment, but I'm thinking about it very slowly and cautiously. Over the years I've had too many 'good' ideas that I've rushed into and have then either had to abandon them or pushed them to a ludicrous fulfillment.
I think moving back to Thailand was a bad idea, but it was so full of good things (like the food and Joom) that I'm not in the least sorry I did it in such haste.
Back in 1995 (where were YOU back in 1995?) I was living in Minneapolis and working at Green Tree Financial as a bill collector -- a miserable job, but one that paid very well. In fact, for the first time in my entire life I had money piling up in the bank. My long marriage to Amy, with eight children, had forced me to become a frugal mooch -- I paid retail for nothing, bought everything except food used, scoured the alleys in our neighborhood for discarded furniture and other household items, and never went shopping for anything for myself. My wallet was a small baggie. Who could afford even imitation leather?
So I lived well within my means.
Once that money began accumulating at Wells Fargo, I had a 'brilliant' idea.
I would start my own literary magazine to rival the New Yorker.
I called it The Minnesota Review of Fictitious Books.
I placed ads in several Minnesota and North Dakota newspapers, soliciting reviews on books that didn't exist, offering to pay $20.00 for each review that I published.
It seemed like a hilarious concept to me, and I received well over a hundred submissions. But most of the submissions were unmitigated drivel, and the few that showed promise had to be extensively edited by me before they were even mildly humorous. The editing ate up all my free time, and impinged on my hours of slumber. I began to not enjoy fulfilling my 'brilliant' idea so much. But I did pay out $200.00 to writers whose work I planned to use in the first edition.
Of course, I wrote my own book reviews too. One of them was a review of a non-existent cookbook called Cooking With Snow. I gave it two-thumbs up for its fried snowball recipe.
Once I had everything arranged to my liking I went looking for a company to collate and publish my brand-new literary gem. RR Donnelly said they would print out 200 copies for the modest price of 12-hundred dollars.
I balked at that, and dropped the whole thing like a wormy head of cabbage.
So today when I get one of my brain storms I just enjoy it in my head and wait a few days for it to dissipate, without spending any time or money on it.
I think the two basic, fundamental things in my life that I will expand and concentrate on in the coming years are my poetry and my cooking. Spending my declining years providing good meals and good laughs should be enough to ease me past Saint Peter at the golden gates.
But then again -- man proposes, but God disposes.
It'll be interesting to see where I'm at and what I'm doing a year from now.
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So finally we get to Church today.
Or rather, we don't. Since I didn't walk the four blocks to Church today.
It snowed about a half foot overnight, and it looked rather treacherous and slippery to me. This was confirmed during choir practice, which is held right in our snug little community room, by the choir director, who said she nearly slid under her own car out in the parking lot.
"Oh ho," said I to myself when I heard that, "why should I risk breaking my neck when nobody around here ever shovels their walks anyways?"
So I stayed inside and went to the Sacrament Meeting our ward holds for the shut-ins. Also in the community room. It was short and sweet. Twenty minutes. As the tavern wits in my childhood used to say: "Slam; bam; thank you ma'am".
It was just me and twenty widows.
I looked them over attentively, and they looked me over attentively.
I must say that the vast majority of 'em had faces that suggested they had breakfasted on cold vinegar and hardtack that morning, and probably for some years back.
I think I'd have better luck with romance at a mortuary.
Of course, their impression of me was probably "that man looks about as pleasant as bag of spiders, and as intelligent as a tree stump."
So now I'm back in my cozy little apartment, having avoided the muck and bother of trudging through the snow to Church. I have made myself a New England boiled dinner, which is enveloped in tinfoil and emitting savory odors from the oven at this moment.
The afternoon and evening will be divided evenly between P.G. Wodehouse and what I can get on Netflix. With a prolonged siesta in there somewhere as well.
It all reminds me of an old Norwegian proverb that I just made up:
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